First You Build the Kitchen

When the chef is also a welder, the food tastes better. An apprenticeship with Frank Crispo Jr. PLUS: Learning how to be a paramedic and a plumber

I obviously got the lazy chicken. Chef Frank Crispo Jr. is showing me how to cut up a whole bird — remove the bones, separate the breasts and legs — and he keeps urging me to "let the chicken do the work." It's tempting to remind him the thing is dead, has been for some time. But then Frank demonstrates. Using just the very tip of his knife, he effortlessly cuts between the joints and along the body, and the meat seems to just slip away from the bone.

I try to mimic him cut for cut, but my incisions are sloppy, and the breast and thigh pieces come off the bone as mangled as McNuggets. So I do what any sane man would do in this frustrating situation: I complain about my tools. "Maybe my knife's not sharp enough?"

Frank trades with me. He's been in the restaurant business for thirty-seven years, starting out as a dishwasher in Italian joints in his native northeast Philly when he was twelve. He worked the line at La Côte Basque, was a sous chef under Daniel Boulud, and now runs his own Italian restaurant in Manhattan, Crispo. He could butcher this bird with a butter knife. His hands are quick and nimble but thick. Working hands. At forty-nine, he's five foot nine, 265 pounds. He likes to make fun of himself for being fat, but he's really more sturdy than soft. He looks how you want a chef to look: like a guy who happily spends his rare day off from the restaurant "researching" cheesesteaks.

As soon as you step inside Crispo, you're engulfed by dark brick, polished wood, wrought iron, and the smell of the kind of comforting regional-Italian food you can't help but gorge yourself on, including the tastiest spaghetti carbonara in New York City. But his reputation for pasta aside, Frank's also known as a fixer. Chefs like Charlie Palmer and Marc Murphy call Frank when they need advice on curing pancetta and cutting prosciutto. They seek him out for guidance on ovens and ventilation and the least slippery type of flooring for a kitchen.

When Frank opened Crispo seven years ago, he didn't have a lot of money to throw around, so he did nearly all the remodeling himself. He installed the burners, the walk-in fridge, and the kitchen exhaust. That was before he hand-built a stone patio with radiant heating, MIG-welded a massive wrought-iron bar with fixtures salvaged from an old subway station, and beautifully restained the floor. You could say all this was labor of necessity, but it turned out that Frank liked the work. Turned out he loved it.

In fact, there's only one thing that gives Frank Crispo more satisfaction than watching a customer use a piece of bread to soak up the last bit of sauce from a bowl of Amatriciana — a moment that Frank describes, eyes rolling back with imagined pleasure, as pretty much his favorite thing in the world. The one thing that elevates that moment is watching it take place on the patio he built stone by stone. People come to him for nourishment and pleasure, and he provides it with his own two hands.

Think of it this way: You feel good when you make something from scratch. Frank made his restaurant from scratch, and it felt good. So he keeps building. Right now he's welding a series of grappa carts that can be wheeled tableside and tending to his collection of fifty antique prosciutto slicers, which he buys on eBay, then rebuilds himself. These days Frank could hire someone to do this stuff, but that would mean outsourcing the satisfaction, too.

Frank's dad was a plumber, so he's always known how to use a wrench. But he'd never poured epoxy flooring or put down a thousand-square-foot gravel foundation. "If I don't know how to do it," Frank says, "I figure, Okay, other people are doing it. I'll figure it out. I'm not afraid to screw it up. I've shut the whole building off to swap out the plumbing. I worked at 3:00 a.m. so no one on the upper floors would flush the toilet. Of course, they did. That wasn't a pretty night."

Frank walks me through the deboning steps again, more slowly this time. But eventually he just takes the bird into his thick hands and knifes it apart himself in seconds. Dinner service is in a few hours, and the kitchen needs about twenty completed hens for the crisp chicken alla diavola, so there's no time for mentoring now. "If I got a weakness," Frank says, "not that I think it's a weakness, you see, but some people say, 'You do too much yourself.'?"

The prep kitchen at Crispo is down a steep steel staircase off the dining room, next to the small basement office Frank uses for ordering and payroll. It's a tight, narrow workspace with stainless-steel tables, plastic cutting boards, a giant mixer, industrial sinks, and a huge fridge and freezer. Every morning crates of portobellos and asparagus, haunches of pork and beef, and chests of fresh seafood are lowered down here from the cargo bay, then unpacked, cleaned, trimmed, parboiled, minced, diced, ground, julienned. Prepped. This is the backbone of cooking, the stuff they don't show on Top Chef. It's tedious, repetitive, exacting.

Frank learned the gospel of prep from his dad, who was obsessive about loading up his truck each morning for every possible plumbing contingency. "He always pushed preventative maintenance, but he knew nothing breaks on Monday morning — it's always Friday night." In other words: Fix it before it becomes a disaster, then be ready for the disaster anyway. "To me, that's synonymous with mise en place," literally French for "setting in place," but used in the food business to describe all the prepped ingredients a chef has on hand during meal service. "Get ready to get ready," Frank says, "then get ready."

It is tempting, even exciting, to think of the dish that arrives at your table as a creation whipped up in the minutes after you order it. But Frank is thinking about your dinner, anticipating your needs and tastes and complaints, before you even eat breakfast. This is not merely prep work, which sounds rote and drab; it's peeling and roasting and setting and salting and resting and chopping away as much room for error as he can, so you can sop up that sauce without thinking at all. After Frank, I'm not sure if I'll ever look at a restaurant bill the same way. Maybe menus should list hours of labor for each dish — but that would tarnish the illusion that you initiate the magic by pointing to a menu item, and no chef worth his toque would want that.

Before prep even gets under way, Frank has his guys carefully inspect every ingredient that comes through Crispo's doors. Yesterday he sent back some halibut. Today as we unpack branzino, he's extra vigilant. "The stuff on top is always good," he says as he digs into the crate. "Half the kitchens in the city don't even check past the top layer when they sign for it. The bad fish is always at the bottom." He digs deeper and pulls out a beautiful-looking branzino. "Now you see how that smells sweet, not fishy? And look how stiff the body is — rigor mortis. The eyes are clear. That's a perfect fish. Fresh. And when fish is in season, the price is good. It's when it's out of season and scarce that the price jumps, even though it's not as good. People think that just because something is cheaper, it's bad, but with food it's often the opposite."

Frank says he's been running Crispo as if the country's been in a recession from the day it opened. On his weekly run to Chef Restaurant Supply, he marches up and down the aisles, checking prices on a half dozen whisks, an ice-cream scooper they use at the restaurant to measure out meatballs, and a small cast-iron pan for panelle (a chickpea-flour pancake) that he plans to serve with fried tripe to a party of Per Se employees later in the week. (It's never a bad thing when the staff of the fanciest restaurant in town chooses your joint for a celebration.) The price differences may be small, but they add up, and Frank passes the savings on to his customers, which is why he says his business is up 20 percent while almost everyone else's is down. When Frank goes to the cashier to settle up, he pulls out a wad of bills. He could easily run a tab, he explains, but he never has and he never will. "I get the right price because I pay right," he says. "I'm not Per Se, but purveyors solicit my business."

After we unpack them, the branzino are handed off to a prep cook for cleaning. Meanwhile I'm put on shrimp detail, probably the least-screw-upable work that needs getting done. Using scissors, I cut into the shells, tug them off, and bundle the peeled shrimp into little paper packets with some olive oil and chervil. (The shells are saved and frozen. Nothing at Crispo is wasted. Bones and shells are used for stocks; unused chicken parts are served to the staff at family meal. "The pig comes in," Frank likes to say, "but only the squeal leaves.")

Most of the kitchen staff here is from Central or South America, and many have been with Frank for years, rising up through the ranks from dishwasher to busboy to prep cook to cook. "My guys, they understand work. And they understand good food. They know when something doesn't taste right. You can't teach that," he says. When Frank was coming up, he and his cooking-school buddies would stay in a kitchen for at least two years. Now grads come in, hang for five months, then jump.

After about twenty minutes of shrimp cleaning, my enthusiasm starts to wane. The shrimp are stored in ice water, so after the thirtieth time grabbing a shrimp to peel, my fingers are stinging. By the fiftieth time, my hands are numb and my dexterity is slowing down. Eventually another prep cook comes over and helps me out. I know what this means: The gringo is a bottleneck.

At 5:00 p.m., Crispo opens for dinner. If the mornings and afternoons are a steady and deliberate arms race, this marks the beginning of the battle. The chicken thighs, the sauces and stocks, the handmade pastas, the peeled shrimp — all have been brought upstairs from the prep kitchen to the proper stations here in the main kitchen, right off the dining room. So we're ready, though ready doesn't mean a damned thing if you can't cook.

I can't offer much in the way of assistance without slowing things down, so I just stick close to Frank. He quickly demonstrates how to make a few of tonight's specials, then takes his place in the kitchen across from his line cooks. At 6:15, the first shots are fired. A few orders trickle in. Frank yells them out in a hybrid of Spanish and Italian — Tres polpette! Dos bistecca alla griglia, crudo! — and the cooks start to broil and boil and sauté.

By 7:15 p.m., orders are pouring in, and busboys and waitresses are bursting through the kitchen's double doors (and around me) with tense urgency. They manage to avoid slamming into one another with subtle footwork that I clearly don't understand because I'm constantly bumping into waiters, then moving to get out of their way and bumping into cooks. I'm glad my Spanish isn't good enough to understand what they are muttering.

Each night, before things get overwhelming in the kitchen, Frank makes a point to spend some time helming the meat slicer at the back of the dining room. "When customers come to a restaurant, they want a story, they want to meet the fat chef by the slicer," he says, shaving off some meat before delivering it to a table of local wine merchants.

Frank cures his own sopressata, pancetta, bresaola, and guanciale. The meats hang for months at a time in a big refrigerator he installed at a warehouse he keeps in Queens, where he also stores staples like olive oil, huge wheels of Parmigiano-Reggiano, and canned tomatoes. Each week Crispo tears through about ten cases of canned Alta Cucina plum tomatoes, which are daily boiled down into the thick marinara the line cooks use to make many of their sauces.

By 9:00 p.m. the kitchen is slammed. Simultaneous seatings of two large parties have Frank calling out rapid-fire orders and hurrying up his cooks. I've had to pin myself into a small cove just to avoid smacking into anyone and disrupting the intense flow. But Frank is calm, even when one customer requests a bottle of ketchup. Frank grimaces but obliges. In fact, he has a bottle right there at his station. "Listen, I don't like to have it," he says, "but I have to laugh at chefs who say, 'You're ruining my food.' I've always stayed away from that attitude." He's got little patience for cooks who try to dictate tastes to their customers and then wonder why they don't come back.

A little while later, a nervous waiter tells Frank a woman has sent back her plate of fried zucchini flowers. The waiter explains that the woman sent them back because they're "not like the ones she makes at home."

Frank looks ready to explode, but it never comes.

"Flexibility is a strength, not a weakness," he says, partially to remind himself. "That's the most important thing my dad taught me. If you come into my restaurant and say, 'I can't eat this,' am I a worse chef because I accommodate you? No way."

He tosses the remaining zucchini in the trash and calls out, "Trifolati salad!" She'll like this more, he thinks, and if not, he'll make her something else. No time to worry. Can't disrupt the rhythm.

Watching him as he keeps going, faster and with more energy, after an eight-hour day, it's hard to believe that five years back Frank thought he would have to give this all up. He was told he needed a double hip replacement, so he came up with a plan for life after Crispo.

"Honestly, I was devastated," he says. "All my life I've been a worker. Nothing's been too hard. Now I wasn't sure if I'd recover. I wasn't sure if I could be on my feet for eight hours a day."

Plenty of great chefs would have set their sights on consulting, writing menus someplace tropical where the customers don't really care about menus. But Frank decided he was going to convert old three-wheeled police scooters into a roaming fleet of gelato carts. Never mind that he didn't know much about converting police scooters. Or about mass-producing gelato. To Frank Crispo, these things are technicalities, glitches to be worked out in the doing.

As his new hips healed, the urgency of starting the gelato business faded, but Frank hasn't given up on his fleet of roving ice-cream carts. He now owns eighteen of them. Just a few more details to work out, he says, like how to design the gelato packaging so it stays fresh and clean. But he'll get it figured out soon. And when Frank says this, you believe him, because he says it in the restaurant he built himself, standing on the kitchen floor he tiled himself, holding the bresaola he cured himself, cutting it with an antique meat slicer he took apart and retrofitted. Himself.

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